Must Read: “The Whitewashing of #WhitePeople Doing Yoga”

On the eve of the opening of his “Why You So Negative?” solo exhibition at Human Resources LA, artist Chiraag Bhakta offers an op-ed on the whiteness of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco’s appropriation of his artwork about the whiteness of the appropriation of yoga titled #WhitePeopleDoingYoga.

Chiraag Bhakta, “The Whitewashing of #WhitePeopleDoingYoga,” Mother Jones, October 17, 2019.

Supporting Essays
Occupying Negative Space by Anuradha Vikram
Keeping it “Real” by Vivek Boray
Our Complicity With Excess by Vijay Iyer

The installation as it appeared at the Asian Art Museum in 2014.  Photos by the author.

Watch whiteness work:  some choice pull quotes from the op-ed:

During our initial meetings at the museum, they told me to “turn down the volume” of my critique. They also insisted I remove a section of the installation—a Hindu-inspired shrine featuring photographs of a white couple as South Asian gurus. “This might be offensive to Indian people,” staffers said—white authorities telling me what Indian people might find offensive.

From the museum’s response:

According to a museum spokesperson, Bhakta was told that the phrase “white people” could be “offensive or puzzling” to some. As examples, the spokesperson pointed to “Anglo practitioners of yoga unfamiliar with the concepts of cultural appropriation/appreciation . . .”

Mindblowing how it’s completely acceptable from the museum’s (Anglo) point of view for Anglo practitioners of yoga to appropriate yoga without an awareness of the politics of cultural appropriation—and to invite such white practitioners of appropriation to perform it inside the museum as part of the museum’s public programs—and yet inappropriate for an Indian American artist to raise the issue of appropriation while at the same time wanting to appropriate his work about it.

Detail of #WhitePeopleDoingYoga installation at Asian Art Museum in 2014

Bhakta puts it in context:

Let’s break this shit down: Here were white elites exerting power over Brown critique that was explicitly about white elites exerting power over Brown culture. […] People across the operation, from the marketing department to the education team to the curatorial staff, continued to sterilize my perspective, tiptoeing around me to make themselves feel more comfortable and spare the museum further controversy. Brown critique had to be sanitized for white consumption.

And the mystery:  who is “this unseen figure in the forest“?

Throughout my meetings with curators and educators, there was one person whose name they kept mentioning as an authority calling the shots—the chief curator, also white, an unseen figure in the forest who seemed to be deliberately keeping a distance.

It’s almost as if this shot-calling “collector of South Asia” is completely unaware of his own coloniality of being, almost as if this issue isn’t part of “our daily conversation, among staffers and just inside our own brains … issues of Orientalism, of context, of how much information to provide and what kind, of what kinds of intentional and unintentional interpretive views we might be putting on things,” as he was quoted by the Chronicle’s Kenneth Baker in response to our own intervention a full decade ago.

Now a collector’s item!

One can’t help but admire Bhakta’s fortitude in engaging not only with curatorial coloniality but also the white fragility of our favorite museum marketing chief, who argued that the words “white people” on the merch—already purchased by the museum store from Bhakta—were “offensive” and “out of context”—unlike the isolated word “Asian” emblazoned on the museum’s very own tote bag.

Oh, the cognitive dissonance of white epistemicide!  The “Asian” never stops to consider what Asian Americans find offensive (because, y’know, the subaltern still cannot speak), and when we ever so artfully try to tell them, well . . .  (I’m already warning students to brace themselves for Hallowe’en) . . .

White people watching #WhitePeopleDoingChanting at a 2014 gala celebrating the Asian Art Museum’s “Yoga: The Art of Transformation” exhibition.

Bhakta concludes:

That was it: My experience with the Asian Art Museum was an exercise in watching white people work out their identity on the back of mine. The platform they seemed to give me, it turned out, wasn’t actually for me—it was for them, a way to fashion my Brownness into something they could wear. White supremacy works that way, for all “minorities”; it censors any critique contained in nonwhite expression and commodifies and tokenizes whatever’s left, forcing people like me into the posture of the model minority.

But I’m the negative one, right?

Learn more about Chiraag Bhakta’s work on PardonMyHindi.com. His solo show, “Why You So Negative?,” opened 10/18 and runs through October 27 at Human Resources in Los Angeles, at 410 Cottage Home Street, HumanResourcesLA.com.